Page:Poet Lore, volume 34, 1923.djvu/196



The landscape is evoked with detached abrupt details, artfully selected, discerned with keen insight and painted with deliberate touch.

He is to be ranked with such singers of simple homely life as Cowper and Wordsworth, and particularly Crabbe, whose rude and somewhat bare style, whose minuteness of observation and scrupulous exactitude of detail he often closely recalls, not, of course, for imitation, but by a kinship of mind. He feels that he was born to a simple, lonely life; he has partly realized this ideal, yet there still lives in his inmost heart a craving for mountain solitude, where he would commune with God and nature, where he would tend his flock among the blue gentians and the far gleaming glaciers.—Or it is a yearning to the quiet of a pious life, to 'the peace which passeth understanding.'

His love for the meek and the humble is prominent in his works. This feeling of charity draws him further and further to God; his aim is now to sing His praise and to give Him the treasures of his heart; he 'strives to be truly His in faith and works;' his prevailing mood is now a continual sense of His presence, an aspiration to Heaven. In the silence of his secluded life he hears these divine whisperings, and, yielding to the call, his soul aspires to its last and only end, to its home and eternal dwelling; he seeks God alone, and wishes to rest in Him, to be dissolved in His love. We seem to hear the cry of St. Augustine.